While the Obama administration trades horses and twists arms to get a nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia through the Senate before the November elections, no one seems to have noticed that Washington is making all the concessions and Moscow none.

Under mounting pressure from the White House, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) has been pushing to vote the treaty out of his committee. That vote was expected last week but now has been postponed until after the August congressional recess. As former Richard Nixon advisor Dimitri Simes wrote in an article last month with Dov Zakheim, "Senator Kerry's undue hurry — which appears at least in part motivated by the politics he himself decries, including a hope to win, for himself and the administration, a public success — is unneeded and inappropriate. The world's greatest deliberative body deserves a little more time."

There are three key reasons why the full Senate should slow down ratification of the New START treaty.